The most basic question about the structure and organization of government is Why we should be concerned about this question at all?' Many of us trained in political science programs during the behavioral revolution were taught to believe that the structures of government were insignificant as a focus for research. The structures ofgovernment became encapsulated in an opaque black box; that part of the political system where decisions were made. Fortunately, this view no longer prevails and there is increasing interest in structural questions, in part generated by the increasing interest in the state as a focus for political inquiry (Dyson, 1980; Benjamin and Elkin, 1985). Much of the work on the state as yet, however, leaves that concept largely undifferentiated and has not dealt systematically with the structure of the state apparatus. Thus, concern for the development of state theory, as well as the concerns of those interested in public policy, has returned structural questions to a more central position in political science.

This paper compares four different theoretical accounts of the reform of British local government finance at the end of the 1980s: public choice, marxian political economy, bureaucratic process, and party politics. Five key questions are identified as the most essential and puzzling features of the change: why reform; the timing of reform and implementation; the national non-domestic rate; the choice of a poll tax; and why the ‘final solution’ of direct central control has been eschewed. The ability of each theoretical approach in answering these five key questions is then assessed in the light of what we know about the history and logic of local government finance in Britain. The conclusion is that the reform can be explained, but that no single theoretical approach can give a completely satisfactory account. Overall, a competitive party politics model, complemented by public choice ideology and bureaucratic process, gives the fullest explanation.

The EU infrastructure policy has relied on Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) as a means to successfully deliver infrastructure of benefit for the EU. To reach its infrastructure policy objectives, the EU has implemented support mechanisms aimed at facilitating the delivery of PPPs. This article is aimed at evaluating to what extent these mechanisms have actually contributed to improving the economic performance of PPPs. To that end, we have selected the case of Spanish road PPPs for empirical analysis. The main result shows that EU support positively influences the economic performance of PPP projects. This is caused by the fact that the EU conditions its financial support on a project’s meeting a set of requirements that help assure the success of the project. From this result, we obtain a set of conclusions that may be generalised to other cases, and provide a contribution to the body of knowledge on PPPs.

Under what conditions do dominant policy ideas change in Japanese bureaucratic organizations? The answer is developed in reference to a rare empirical case in which critical information has been released about intra-bureaucracy politics, the Japanese Ministry of Finance during the 1969–1971 international monetary crisis. The paper contends, first, that the crisis did not automatically lead to a change of a dominant policy idea prevalent in the Ministry. A policy change occurred only after tactful leadership was exercised by the highest Ministry official. Second, dynamics of paralysis and change were strongly shaped by structures and norms characteristic of Japanese organizations. At a more general level, the case study shows that the exercise of policy-changing leadership vis-á-vis bureaucracies depends on two intra- governmental structure variables: institutional arrangements within and surrounding bureaucracies; and the level of information control exercised by bureaucracies.

Given pervasive gridlock at the national level, state legislatures are increasingly the place where notable policy change occurs. Investigating such change is difficult because it is often hard to characterise policy change and use observable data to evaluate theoretical predictions; it is subsequently unclear whether law-making explanations focusing on the US Congress also apply to state legislatures. We use several measures of state policy outcomes to examine lawmaking in state legislatures across nearly two decades, and we argue for using simulation studies to connect theoretical predictions to empirical specifications and help interpret the theoretical relevance of estimated correlations. Doing so reveals that the observed law-making outcomes we study are most consistent with law-making models emphasising the importance of the chamber median and the powers of the governor rather than those that focus on the preferences of the majority party.

As intense international competition along with rapidly changing product markets and technology have come to dominate the economic environment for firms, industries, and nations, government pursuit of a coordinated, proactive industrial policy has increasingly been viewed as a key to national economic success. Owing largely to its utility in generating consensus-formation, corporatist concertation has been suggested by a number of commentators as an ideal mechanism for implementing industrial policies. However, the legitimacy of corporatism as a mode of interest intermediation rests on the capacity of interest group representatives to win benefits for all their members, while industrial policy decisions are by nature selective or discriminatory. This feature of industrial policy casts doubts upon its compatibility with corporatism. The postwar policy-making experiences of Japan, Sweden, and West Germany support this skepticism.

Existing research identifies partisan differences in taxing choices made by state governments. Research has also found that, even when controlling for intrastate characteristics such as party, jurisdictions respond to the taxing decisions of their neighbours, particularly when citizens can easily cross-border shop. These studies treat political and competitive factors as independent influences on taxes. We suggest they are more likely to interact in taxing decisions. We argue that the political costs of cross-border shopping are higher for Republicans, and the threat of it should have a greater negative impact on taxes when that party controls major state policy-making institutions. Our analyses of state cigarette taxes between 1980 and 2011 confirm that a higher threat of cross-border shopping has a larger negative impact on taxes under Republican governors. We conclude that, by missing the interaction between partisanship and the threat of fiscal mobility, previous work misestimates key influences on tax competition.

Research into the detection of fraud and corruption has brought many new insights in recent decades, partly thanks to a decrease in the costs of data collection and processing. However, access to data often remains an issue, especially when fraud or corruption seems to be present. This article applies a simple detection method focussing on possible manipulations in the car registration process in the Czech Republic, where car registration plates are allegedly assigned in random order. As access to official data was denied, we collected data in the field for a random sample of 5,000 cars, and used this to examine the existence of statistical relationships between the cars’ estimated price at registration and their registration plate numbers. The results show that cars with intuitively appealing registration plates are on average significantly more expensive than other cars. Moreover, this price difference corresponds to the relative scarcity of the given type of registration plate number, which could be a sign of discretionary behaviour in the allocation of such plates.

This paper examines the determinants of Japan's most serious postwar blunder: failure to define and implement effective and timely counter-measures to deal with its change from deficit to surplus international monetary status during the 1969–1971 period. It concludes that intense bureaucratic compartmentalization and a lack of supra-ministerial leadership of national policy were key determinants of this failure, leaving Japan's political system dependent upon irresistible external pressure (gai-atsu,) in this case from the United States, to define and force implementation of necessary policy changes. This critical but largely ignored episode illustrates a negative aspect of the traditional insulation of Japan's national bureacracy from political (as opposed to administrative) interference in the definition and pursuit of basic national policy objectives.

In the context of declining relative output and productivity there have been increasing calls for the American government to play a greater role in industrial policy in recent years. Traditionally, however, US government intervention has been ad hoc and reactive rather than planned and strategic. Regulation policy has rarely been linked to economic growth, and most recently has evolved in a policy context separate from and largely antagonistic to business. Direct and indirect government aid is largely a result of the lobbying activities of diverse economic interests operating in an open but fragmented policy system. Of the various industrial policy options open to federal governments only one, facilitative or positive adjustment policy, is politically and ideologically possible. Even this, however, will be difficult to implement in a pluralistic and fragmented political system.

Over the past three decades, a reform movement bent on improving schools and educational outcomes through standards-based accountability systems and market-like competitive pressures has dominated policy debates. Many have examined reform policies’ effects on academic outcomes, but few have explored these policies’ influence on citizens’ political orientations. In this study, using data from an original survey, I examine whether and how No Child Left Behind’s accountability-based architecture influences parents’ attitudes towards the government and federal involvement in education. I find little evidence that diversity in parents’ lived policy experiences shapes their political orientations. However, the results of a survey experiment suggest that information linking school experience to policy and government action may increase parents’ confidence in their ability to contribute to the political process. Understanding whether and under what conditions parents use public school experiences to inform orientations towards the government can improve the design of future reforms.

Drawing primarily from the Turkish example, this essay examines the fit of the input-output policy model, widely used in West, to less developed countries (LDCs). Three hypotheses are explored. In LDCs, compared to the West: (1) Policy patterns are more subject to political penetration; (2) once implemented, policies have a higher probability of penetrating social conditions; and (3) implementation structures and practices are less penetrable by policy directives.

The major bottleneck to innovative policy formation and delivery in LDCs is the implementation process. Bureaucratic resistance and hesitancy to innovate are due to a control rather than service orientation, stemming from the peculiar sequencing of development of state apparatuses vis-a-vis the marketplace. These historical-institutional peculiarities do not appear to detract from the input-output model's ability to spot targets of opportunity for useful policy inquiry in LDCs.

This paper examines the logic and implications of the Single European Market for the food manufacturing sector. It points to the role of multinationals in this sector and the process of concentration through merger and acquisition as a central growth strategy. It suggests that rather than encourage further concentration, European policy should concern itself with the benefits as well as the problems of regional differentiation and the complementarity rather than the conflict of different scales of production and distribution.

The publication of a major report on social expenditure under the auspices of the OECD Manpower and Social Affairs Committee raises many questions relevant to public policy. The report is distinctive in that it not only deals with public expenditure for the past two decades, but also projects to 1990 levels of public expenditure for income-maintenance, health, education and related programmes. Given the variety of questions raised by this report – analytic, methodological, comparative and prescriptive – the Journal of Public Policy is making it the subject of an international symposium, with comments from leading social scientists and policymakers of diverse experiences and orientations, who have been invited to examine the foundations of the report, and to consider its implications

The paper considers the size and the implications of the errors made by the British Treasury in forecasting the budget over the period 1951–84. On average the Treasury underestimated the public sector fiscal deficit by 0.5 per cent of GDP; this is about half the average amount by which Chancellors attempted to change aggregate demand by means of their budgets. The general pattern was for tax revenue to be under-predicted, but for public expenditure to be under-predicted by even more. The government's fiscal deficit and thus the reflationary effect of government policy was therefore greater than the Treasury intended.

A decomposition exercise carried out on the Treasury's own model for the fiscal year 1980/81 suggests that only about half of this error is due to errors in the specification of the model; the other half is due to errors in data estimation and in forecasting exogenous variables. Hence, the scope for improving forecasts by improvements to the model is limited. The paper considers three alternative methods by which forecasts could be improved: the application of realisation functions relating forecast to actual values; more frequent budgeting; and an attempt to derive more tax revenue from those categories (such as excise duties on alcohol, petrol and tobacco) whose yield is easiest to predict.

In the literature on the role of agency in the policy process, relatively little attention has been devoted to how agents define policy problems. This article helps to address this gap by asking when and how policy entrepreneurs are successful in defining problems. The article rests on a framework that shows how policy entrepreneurs holding specific ideas and given a propitious socioeconomic context are able to define problems, translate those problems into new frames, and draw on those frames, while using their personal skills and political and institutional resources, to help build supportive coalitions in favor of policy change. Illustrated by a puzzling case in the field of European mobility policy, the article offers a new perspective on the role of ideas at the problem definition stage of the policy process, while providing a richer understanding of the policy entrepreneur as a driver of policy change.

Although the United States (US) federal bureaucracy is plagued by high vacancy rates generally, quorum requirements and small board sizes make vacancies particularly problematic within major independent regulatory commissions. Not all vacancies, however, are created equal. By statute, some major boards allow members to continue serving beyond their original term in the absence of a confirmed replacement. The difference between an empty seat and a holdover official is important as it can determine whether a board is functional or inoperable. In this article, we examine how the presence of holdover provisions within such commissions alters confirmation dynamics and vacancy rates. Evidence suggests that holdover provisions lead to quicker confirmation on nominations as well as fewer complete vacancies. Such structures thus help mitigate the short-term problems stemming from staffing independent regulatory boards, especially given the tendency towards obstruction in the US Senate.

In 2010, the United States Congress placed a moratorium on earmarks – congressionally mandated spending projects. But did the earmark moratorium actually rid public policy of earmarks? I use earmark data and 2010–2020 state-level highway funding metrics to examine the relationship between previously expired transportation earmarks and federal highway funding during the earmark moratorium. Earmarks in the 2005 surface transportation law (SAFETEA-LU) continued to benefit certain states in 2020, even though the projects technically expired in 2009. This is because the funding “formulas” established by all post-2009 surface transportation laws were fully determined by the highway allocation percentage each state received in the preceding year, inclusive of earmarks. Further, I find the relationship between SAFETEA-LU earmarks and state funding disparities strengthened from 2010 to 2020, meaning the expired earmarks increased in policy significance during the moratorium. Highly earmarked states became even more advantaged after the earmarks were institutionalised into the highway funding formula.